Intel Diamondville Details Leaked

10W TDP Processors are impressive, but Intel wants to offer an entire system within that envelope.

If you thought that the details uncovered yesterday of Intel’s Centrino 2-destined processors were impressive, and trust us we did, then prepare to be doubly impressed today. Details of the forthcoming Diamondville release suggest that the entire system; CPU, chipset and all, could operate within a 10W envelope – an undeniably impressive feat.

According to leaked details, passed to DailyTech, Diamondville processors are still using the 45nm High-K process developed for Penryn, but are not based on the Core 2 architecture. Instead the new CPUs have been designed from the ground up with an entirely new architecture specifically for low-power operation.

Supposedly the first processors to be released, at the end of Q2, will be the Diamondville-SC 230 and Diamondville-SC 270, intended for desktop and mobile systems respectively. The chips will run at 1.6GHz, have 512MB L2 caches and (this is the impressive bit) 4-8W TDPs. Of course as the architecture is different from the Core 2 desktop range of CPUs, the specs don’t actually give any indicator of performance.

Later in the year, dual core versions of these chips will also make their debut and will be targeted towards low-power desktop systems. If Intel can get some decent video-decoding into the platform Diamondville could well make itself a big hit with HTPC systems, especially given the fanless, and thus noiseless, design. In addition to that possible use, various third parties have already suggested that Diamondville will be making its way into their Eee PC-like sub-notebooks – roll on Q3.